In Theaters: She's Out of My League

But the film's not called Diner, or Funny People, it's She's Out of My League (a potential working title for every other Apatow film) so in struts the plot honey on four-inch stilettos. Party planner (do women do anything else in romantic comedies anymore?) Molly (Alice Eve) is on her way to New York when she drops the jaws -- in hair-ruffling slo-mo -- of everyone at Pittsburgh International. It's an intro about as inspired as the later use of Tal Bachman's easy listening ode to female unattainability. Recently dumped by a first class cad, Molly's looking for a sure thing, and so when Kirk accidentally winds up with her phone, she calls herself to make a date. Compulsively affable, she is another version of Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works and Greta Gerwig in the upcoming Greenberg: the fantasy blonde just looking for a damaged whinger to shower with smiles and Lady Di doe eyes.

Subjected to this goddess's attention, Baruchel plays the bewilderment and terror of actually getting what you think you've always wanted perfectly, and the trash-talking debriefs with his crew relieve the incredulity of the coupling at the film's ostensible center. The script (by Sean Anders and John Morris) moves out of its own league when it actually tries to make that coupling work. With nothing convincing to say about class discrepancies and social pressures in relationships or the kind of beauty that the less-than-beautiful can't separate from their own battered self-image, League is most successfully -- once again -- concerned with the eccentric bonds of bromance.

In a different mood I might have had less patience for it, and would definitely have been more put off by the representation of women as either toothy fawns with big, milky boobs or unscrupulous uggos embalmed by their own bitterness. But comedy, like love, is largely a game of chance, and this time it got the girl.

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